Thoughts on Discussion

The discussion of Supernatural and the beginning of Cat's Cradle got me thinking on how differently I can view things now. Usually when reading or watching something I just see what is on the surface and not read so much more into it. Listening to everyone talk about their thoughts on the show and the book made me realize I have the same thoughts but it would just take me a little while more to figure them out. I can tell this class and future books we will be reading will lead me to become more of a mindful reader.

research

Today for the first time I decided to look through the posts on this blog. I came across one post that expressed concern about "cheating" when looking up words that are unique to Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Yet, I was more shocked that we hadn't received prior warning about the terminology in this book that would be unfamiliar to us. Clearly we are all old enough to look up what a word means without the assistance of a teacher, but the experience reminded me of my reading of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. For those of you who have read this work, you know that much of the vocabulary is unique to the book, as the author created a new dialect that can kind of be described as a mix between English and Russian. Before reading this book for my senior year English class, our teacher advised us to look up a nadsat (the name of the dialect) dictionary. Me being lazy, I decided that this was unnecessary and that I could figure out the meaning of the unfamiliar words from the context. Well, I couldn't get through the first page without resorting to google to get a copy of the nadsat glossary.
While the unique language in A Clockwork Orange is much more extreme than that in Cat's Cradle, it makes one wonder, if the author is injecting words that he/she made up the definition for, how much of the language is up to us to interpret, and how much is the author shoving his/her point of view directly into your head without you having any say in how to process it? In a way, this is an act of the author manipulating your idea of the "truth" of the text.

Old reading/New reading

So, I feel as if writing another blog about Owl Creek Bridge will be redundant to our classroom discussion and everyone else's response on here. At this point, comments are the only thing that make sense. That way it can turn into a discussion instead of "he tricked us" and "it made the story more interesting because it wasn't what we expected".

Cat's Cradle, on the other hand, seems like it will be an easy ready as far as the font and the small chapters, but the whole new religion concept is going to be something to wrap my brain around. The quote in chapter 4 "all of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies" really interests me. I haven't read far enough yet, but maybe this could mean things in our life that we take as truth really have an underlying/deeper meaning that we do not question? We'll see. I'm interested to hear what everyone else thinks of these oxymoronic quotes also. :)

Reading class Materials

I started reading 'Cat's Cradle' today, and the first thing I did was look up a word I was unfamiliar with. Now, I feel as if I did something wrong because the only description of the word was a summary of the book itself. Has this happened to anyone else? And if it has, do you feel like you cheated at all?

The Art of Trickery

It's been a number of years since I've read this story by Bierce, yet it still fascinates and dumbfounds me. For his time, his use of mystery and tricking the reader was generally unheard of. When one starts reading the story, it appears to the common eye as just another boring account of war-trials around the time of the American Civil War. However, at the climax and initial descent, it's much more than that: it's a reflection on life and how quickly it goes, and how unexpected events (such as your own hanging) can fool us into thinking we are experiencing something else. It's safe to say that most of us have had at least one "out of body" experience, where we are outsiders looking in at a particular situation that is going on at that time. For Peyton Farquhar, he was looking at both his life and death in retrospect, unaware that life as he knew it had been literally snapped away.

Mislead Intentionally?

Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a short novel about a man named Peyton Farquhar who is basically tricked into his own death. And just as he was tricked, so are we when we read this interesting story. It leads us to believe that Farquhar had escaped and is alive when all the while he's really dead. Some people don't believe that it was Bierce's intention to trick the reader into believing one thing and then showing them in the end that everything they believed throughout the previous chapter was all just a pigment of Farquhar's imagination. Personally, I think it was meant to trick the reader because honestly the story would be kind of dull and boring in my opinion if it didn't have this sort of twist to it. What do you all think?

Unsavory Truth

In Ambrose Bierce's short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," the reader must be mislead in order to have much of a story to tell. Without this trickery there would be little to the plot, and a much less substantial climax if one at all. The trickery is the apparent escape of Peyton Farquhar when the reader in lead to believe that the rope from which hi is being hung breaks. He is then frantically freeing himself, although at ties against his own will, and reaches safety after quite a struggle. When Farquhar arrives home to his beautiful wife, the reader soon learns that this entire endeavor to return home was just a figment of Farquhar's imagination.

When looking back this "untruth" seems far-fetched to say the least, but by being such an unlikely occurrence it relied heavily on the reader willing it to be true. The same can be said for the power of Farquhar's mind. He willed himself to believe the daydream that he made it home to his wife and children rather than having accepted his death. The likability of the gentleman, the fact that he has a family, and the courage to fight for what he believes in, made many a reader cheer for him and want his dream to be true rather than his reality.

It is not necessarily the likeliness of a happening that makes it believable, but possibly how much the audience wants it to happen.

I realize this is incredibly nit-picky of me, but I noticed on the bottom of page four of the Bierce that instead of saying that Farquhar opened his eyes he "unclosed" them. I don't know if Bierce intended it that way, but is this word choice significant at all? Is it possible that this is another clue to the illusion of his escape? I really have no answer to this, I just want to know what everyone else has to say about it.